Creative Commons for Religious Professionals: Copyright

Copyright and Creative Commons go hand-in-hand. Creative Commons doesn't replace copyright or work around it. Creative Commons are copyright licenses that makes copyright law work for creators. It has both a simple, human readable part that is easily understand and a legally part that takes a creators desire to share their work and makes it work legally within copyright law. 

Image: "Copyright" by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 

"Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States to the authors of “original works of authorship” that are fixed in a tangible form of expression. An original work of authorship is a work that is independently created by a human author and possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. A work is “fixed” when it is captured (either by or under the authority of an author) in a sufficiently permanent medium such that the work can be perceived, reproduced, or communicated for more than a short time. Copyright protection in the United States exists automatically from the moment the original work of authorship is fixed." 

Source: Copyright Basics: Circular 1

• to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords
• to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work
• to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending
• in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly
• in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly
• in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

Source: ​​​​​​17 U.S.C. §§ 107-122

Except where otherwise noted, content on this Library Guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.